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MODERN DAY INQUISITORS!
No matter how civilized a government, how restrained it is in dealing with its citizens, and how much it prefers to use the carrot rather than the stick, there are always a few bulldogs around ready to thump on malefactors' tender spots over matters of special concern to the state.
And if there's any one matter of special concern that governments have in common, it's the gathering-in of the lifeblood of all rulers: Taxes. So it comes as no surprise that the Internal Revenue Service, that gatherer of taxes for the United States government, has a history of tactics and transgressions against human decency that would make the hot-poker
wielders of the Inquisition proud.
When examining the IRS' history of malevolence, there's such an embarrassment of riches that it's difficult to know where to start.
Should we look at its use as a political enforcer by presidents dating back to Herbert Hoover? That's juicy stuff, but it's bound to mire us in the past.
How about the massive corruption scandal that engulfed the IRS after World War II? That's interesting, but it also gets us stuck in ancient history.
Hmmm. Well, then, let's start with the latest round of congressional hearings on the tax agency's transgressions.
In 1997 and 1998, after years of horror stories about the treatment of taxpayers by IRS agents, the Senate Finance Committee held hearings to find out just what was going on (and to attract a few votes, as lawmakers who feel our pain).
Senators were told by tax attorney Robert Schriebman that the IRS exercises a variety of unconstitutional powers. Among them:
The IRS can take a taxpayer's home on just the signature of the District Director alone. There is no court hearing, no notice and no opportunity to litigate the merits of the IRS' claim.
The IRS can close down a business and take away a taxpayer's livelihood by merely filing a few papers in federal court. The judge simply signs the seizure order and that's all there is to it.
That's all there is to it?
Well, it would be bad enough if that were true, but wait! There's more!
The IRS's own former historian, Shelley Davis, (http://www.senate.gov/~enzi/davis.htm") told the senators that the tax agency deliberately destroyed its own records "due to a lack of attention to, or concern for, the law which requires all federal agencies to preserve records of what they do."
Why destroy their records? To be sure, they did it to make sure "that the IRS could never be held accountable for its actions."
Davis also revealed that "[i]n the cloistered environment of the IRS, criticism of the IRS, or the income tax, equals tax protester. Anyone who has the misfortune of bearing that title is most likely going to witness first hand just what 'taxpayer abuse' really means."
The committee then heard from a long line of taxpayers who had the first-hand knowledge to which Davis referred, and most of them had never made an effort to attract the IRS' attention. Among the more poignant witnesses was John Colaprete who, as owner of the Jewish Mother restaurant in Virginia Beach, Virginia, had been subject to mistreatment so outrageous that it made national headlines.
Colaprete's restaurant, his home, and the home of his manager were raided by IRS agents on the say-so of a former Jewish Mother bookkeeper who was trying to wriggle out of an embezzlement rap. The effort didn't work (she later became an unwilling guest of the state of North Carolina), but the results were what Colaprete himself referred to as a "dance with the devil."
After a well-publicized earful of testimony -- including a line-up of IRS agents who spoke from behind a screen -- Congress coughed up the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998.
This 1998 law was intended to trim some of the tax agency's nastier abuses, so that it could sheer the sheep without bringing them into open revolt.
Among its provisions, the reform law established an oversight board to keep the tax collectors within certain limits. The burden of proof in tax cases was shifted to the IRS, and agents are now liable to dismissal for violating taxpayers' civil rights.
Draconian stuff, that. At least, the IRS would have you think so.
Tax collectors have been screaming like stuck pigs, complaining that they can't do their jobs if they're in jeopardy of being fired for the occasional use of hot tongs.
To make up for the limitations on torture devices, the IRS now wants to>hire more inquisitors. (http://www.marketwatch.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=Cong70dicsvjtqxvKAxrZ&FQ")
It is true, though. The tax man's take has apparently dropped off since the reform law passed.
Congress is now considering restoring a bit of the IRS' old arbitrary ferocity. And of course, this suggests that after a few years, we'll be back where we started, listening to more testimony about the renewed predations of the tax Torquemadas upon the American public.
The Cato Institute's Theodore J. Forstmann and Stephen Moore predicted as much, even as the IRS testimony still echoed through the nation's news media. They suggested that nothing would change as long as folks focused on the enforcers instead of what was being enforced.
The only effective reform, suggested Cato, would be the implementation of a tax system that didn't require an IRS. "A flat tax or consumption tax is the best way to tame the IRS. The intrusiveness of the tax collectors is directly proportional to the size of the tax code."
Many of us might like to ditch taxes entirely -- that'd surely tame the IRS.
Short of that fundamental reform, we could probably settle for a system that permanently removed the tax inquisitors from our lives.
This Free-Market.Net Spotlight: ( http://www.free-market.net/spotlight/taxation/ ) was written by J.D. Tuccille.
See them for a large directory of news, op-eds, books, activist resources, and much more on taxes and taxation. (http://www.free-market.net/directorybytopic/taxation/)
Copyright 1995-2000, The Henry Hazlitt Foundation.
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